


DN

by dawittiest



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: (teen bride), Ableism, Abuse of Power, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Child Abuse, Child Marriage, Cult, Dark, F/M, Gender Change, Grooming, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Patriarchy, Rape, Referenced Child Murder, Religion, Unreliable Narrator, purity culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 08:10:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14848992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawittiest/pseuds/dawittiest
Summary: When Matty was nine years old God saved her.





	DN

**Author's Note:**

> THE TAGS ARE HERE FOR A REASON. This is a no-holding-back story about a cult. More detailed (spoilery) warnings in the end notes.
> 
> Big thanks as always to DancingPlague for putting up with my insatiable thirst for MOREPAIN and nitpicking tendencies, and for making my writing the best it can be.

When Matty was nine years old God saved her.

Dad is dead and in the ground and with that Matty is now a spare child. “You’ll be lucky if a foster family takes you,” a lady at Child Services tells her. “Looking after a blind kid, and one blind as a bat at that, is a heavy burden to handle. ‘Specially when you have other kids to worry about.” She shows Matty to a bed bunk; Matty bangs her cane around and stretches her fingers until the tips bump on the frame. Starchy blanket like ant-bites, a broken spring in the mattress. “Well, settle in!” Lady flaps her arms, the arms slap on her hips. “Make yourself at home.”

Matty’s toes stick out of the shorty blanket; it’s quiet and alone, and it keeps her awake all through the night.

Then a miracle happens.

“Someone wants to take you in,” a lady, different lady, says. There’s always a different lady and they never tell Matty their names. “Well, if everything goes well,” she corrects. “A man will come look at you on Monday.”

“What man?” Matty asks.

“A man,” lady says. “He will come on Monday. It’s really a miracle. You should be thankful.”

On Monday, the man comes. “Hurry, girl,” a lady says, different lady, and Matty gulps last big mouthfuls of scrambled eggs and drops her plate at the collection window with a clang. “Careful!” lady says.

First comes rap-tapping melody, an all-familiar cane sound, and then the man appears. Tall, Matty thinks. Like a tree.

“You’re blind,” Matty says.

The man snorts. “Not the brightest, are you?” Matty burns with shame and bites a chunk out of the inside of her mouth. No one wants a girl that talks back.

The man takes her out to the courtyard. “You can call me Stick,” he tells her.

“That’s a made-up name,” Matty says. The man stops.

“What’s your name, girlie?” he asks her.

“Matty,” Matty says.

“That’s a made-up name too,” he snorts. “‘Matty’ is not your Christian name, ain’t it? Besides, all names are made-up, girlie.” He carries on walking.

“Why’s your name Stick?” Matty asks. She points at the cane. “Because of this?” He laughs at her.

“Don’t be stupid, girlie,” he says. “God called and I answered. A holy man must forget his old life and his old name with it—‘Jesus’ wasn’t his given name either. The act of giving a name, girlie – it births a Messiah.” Matty pushes her cane on the crunching asphalt.

“Are you a priest?”  she asks finally. Stick snorts again.

“I’m a teacher,” he tells her. “I’m going to teach you salvation.”

 

 

 

_Would you state your name for the record?_

“My name is Mathilda Murdock,” Matty says.

How do you know the defendant?

“He took me in,” she says, “after my father died.”

“I was nine, yes. Stick, he… He brought me up.”

Matty straightens in her chair.

“I was with the Church of Blessed Mary’s Chastity for twelve years.”

 

 

 

Stick takes her to a farm that’s miles and miles into the stretching Upstate New York country. The road sign, she’s told, says the farm is thirty miles east from Syracuse. Matty doesn’t know where Syracuse is on the map. It’s not New York City. There are cows moaning, horses kicking up dust, children running slalom in-between chickens pecking at the ground. Matty asks where are the stores and Stick laughs and says, we’ve got everything we need here.

The farm lies to sleep at dusk and rises with dawn. Boys all sleep in a big room and girls sleep in the other one. She’s never alone now.

At noon the children gather around the living hall – Stick says, classroom – scattered in a loose circle. The eldest teens sit on the windows. Sara and Magdalene are the only adults that are not Stick, they stay by the door. Matty curls on the carpet, heels tucked under her, at the front. She doesn’t need a good view, but she wants to hear.

Stick sits at the head of the circle. His legs are crossed, his palms are on his knees.

“Soft things are poison,” he says. “They make you weak. Surrounding yourself with commodities like people do these days, indulging your laziness, is death. The Lord says: do not love this evil world or the worldly things. If you love the world, the love of God is not in you.”

“The world wages war against your soul. You were no people before, but now you’re God’s people. Cut yourself off from the sins of the rest of the world, cut that life off.” He carries on, “God’s way demands sacrifices. Some of you won’t make it. But only if you give the Lord sweat and blood you’ll be worthy of salvation.”

Stick gives her tasks. Never idle hands here. Cleaning the stables, work in the garden. It’s hard work, but children need to be untaught weakness. Everyone’s got their part to do, he tells her. Everyone has to work for the community, or this world’s no place for them.

Matty brings ten buckets of water from a well every day for the kitchen. Stick tells her how to carry the bucket on her back with a shoulder pole. “How will I hold my cane?” Matty says. Sight is a distraction, Stick reminds her. “If you can’t get around without a crutch, you don’t deserve to have it,” he tells her and snaps the cane in half.

The tasks mark the days. She knows when it’s Sunday – it’s the Holy Day – but the rest of it slips away from her. They don’t live by the world’s rules. They don’t need people’s calendars.

Stick laughs when Matty rebels against washing out in the cold on the Bathing Day. I’ll get sick, Matty says and Stick repeats _sick_ like it’s no excuse. “You’re spiky, girlie,” he says. “You’ve got a fight in you, that’s good. Use this anger. God gifted you with it and that’s your strength. But don’t give into the wickedness in you. Devil is stubborn and it’s defiant. Listen to me, girlie, ‘cause only by following the righteous path you can be cleansed of your sins.”

Ivy is spiky, Matty thinks.

Devilskin, he calls her.

 

 

 

“It was a good life,” Matty says.

How old were you when you got married?

“Sixteen.”

The defendant was your legal guardian when he married you, is that correct?

“It wasn’t like that.” She creases the fabric of her skirt between her fingers. “I loved him.”

 

 

 

Stick hits her for the first time when she stumbles under the weight of the water bucket and falls hard to the ground. Not as hard as his cane breaking on her back.

“What a waste,” he says, indicating the spilled pool of water, and the broken cane, and Matty.

She gets no food for days. It’s damp there, in the cellar, damp and cold. Matty’s got mice for companions and a metal basin of her urine and the urine of the girl before her, the girl that never came back. Water’s once a day.

“You’ve wasted enough,” Stick says. Thirst is weakness. The weak have no place here.

Matty learns to make without food but weakness is tough to uproot from her devil heart. Stick hits her many times after that.

He says, “What I do, I do out of love.”

 

 

 

She hears him in the hallway, being lead away in cuffs, clanking like cow bells.

“Matty,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

Stick snorts. “You’re such a sucker for _feelings_ , always have been, girlie. Want me to hold your hand, tell you God forgives everything if you only say you’re really sorry? Life doesn’t coddle, Devilskin.”

“Don’t call me that,” Matty murmurs. “Don’t call me that, I’m not a child anymore—”

“No?” Stick says. “Then what is all this if not a denied child throwing a big tantrum?”

“Why did you cast me out?” Matty whispers. “ _I loved you_ , and it was so hard, but I _loved_ you…”

“Tough luck, girlie,” Stick says. “It wasn’t good enough.”

 

 

 

They drape her in a dress made from sheers and homemade crochet. They tell her: today is your birthday. Sixteen, Matty repeats to herself. She’s sixteen.

“You’re a woman now, Matty,” Stick says. “And a woman needs a man.”

He takes her to the chapel in the old run-down barn. It’s empty save for a humble altar and a linen cloth spread out on the dirt ground. They kneel on the cloth and Stick looks up to the sky, praying. He tips the chalice to his lips and then passes it to Matty to drink from it. She takes a big swallow, wine, acerbic. Stick’s voice chanting prayers fades away and she’s lulled halfway into sleep. “Blessed is this union,” he says, drifting and far away.

He lays her on the cloth. The ground is hard under her back, Stick is hanging heavy above her. Matty floats up in the wooden beam of the barn roof, her limbs buzzing.

Stick pushes inside her and makes her hurt, pierces through the lull. He puts his hand between where they meet and brings his wet finger to her mouth.

“Look, girlie.” He pushes the tip of his finger against her soft lip. “We’re joined together in blood. You’ve bled for me and you’re mine now.”

 

 

 

Tell me about that night.

“Stick took me to her room, where girls sleep,” Matty says, growing vacant. “She was sleeping on the bottom bunk, her pigtails were strewn on her pillow. I touched her and she didn’t stir.”

“He said she was very ill. I asked him, does she have temperature? Stick laughed and said, her soul is sick.”

What did he mean?

“A couple boys from the Church lead her to the woods,” Matty recalls. “Stick said they took turns with her, like a man should only be with wife. He told me, a girl can’t live with that shame.”

And what did he say next?

Matty closes her eyes.

 

 

 

“It’s mercy,” Stick says and pushes a pillow into her hands. “This world is a bad place for the weak. You’ll be saving her.”

Matty runs her finger along one messy pigtail. Why doesn’t she stir? “She’s a child,” Matty says.

“Not anymore.” Stick grabs her by the arm and tightens his sinewy coarse fingers around her bare flesh. “You want to prove your faith? This is it, girlie. God’s watching.”

 

 

 

“I couldn’t do it.” Matty’s voice breaks. “She was just a child and I couldn’t, and I begged him not to, but he cast me out from the Church and I don’t know what happened after, God forgive me.”

“He’s not a bad man,” Matty says. “He saved me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for gang-rape of a young girl (not explicit). The POV character is told by her cult leader to kill the girl in order to “save her.” Also, Stick’s usual charming disdain for anything he perceives as weakness.
> 
>  
> 
> Fun fact: Oneida Community was located thirty miles east of Syracuse. The cult in this story isn’t based on it.
> 
> Stick is quoting from John 2:15-16 and Peter 2:10-11, based on New American Bible and adapted for the purposes of this story.
> 
> The title’s from Lana del Rey’s _Ultraviolence_ which is the reason this fic exists.
> 
> Comments mean everything to me.


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